The Poems of Emma Lazarus

Sweet empty sky of June without a stain,

Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills,

Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain,

That each dark copse and hollow overfills;

The rippling laugh of unseen, rain-fed rills,

Weeds delicate-flowered, white and pink and gold,

A murmur and a singing manifold.

The gray, austere old earth renews her youth

With dew-lines, sunshine, gossamer, and haze.

How still she lies and dreams, and veils the truth,

While all is fresh as in the early days!

What simple things be these the soul to raise

To bounding joy, and make young pulses beat,

With nameless pleasure finding life so sweet.

On such a golden morning forth there floats,

Between the soft earth and the softer sky,

In the warm air adust with glistening motes,

The mystic winged and flickering butterfly,

A human soul, that hovers giddily

Among the gardens of earth's paradise,

Nor dreams of fairer fields or loftier skies.

Thin summer rain on grass and bush and hedge,

Reddening the road and deepening the green

On wide, blurred lawn, and in close-tangled sedge;

Veiling in gray the landscape stretched between

These low broad meadows and the pale hills seen

But dimly on the far horizon's edge.

In these transparent-clouded, gentle skies,

Wherethrough the moist beams of the soft June sun

Might any moment break, no sorrow lies,

No note of grief in swollen brooks that run,

No hint of woe in this subdued, calm tone

Of all the prospect unto dreamy eyes.

Only a tender, unnamed half-regret

For the lost beauty of the gracious morn;

A yearning aspiration, fainter yet,

For brighter suns in joyous days unborn,

Now while brief showers ruffle grass and corn,

And all the earth lies shadowed, grave, and wet;

Space for the happy soul to pause again

From pure content of all unbroken bliss,

To dream the future void of grief and pain,

And muse upon the past, in reveries

More sweet for knowledge that the present is

Not all complete, with mist and clouds and rain.

Look westward o'er the steaming rain-washed slopes,

Now satisfied with sunshine, and behold

Those lustrous clouds, as glorious as our hopes,

Softened with feathery fleece of downy gold,

In all fantastic, huddled shapes uprolled,

Floating like dreams, and melting silently,

In the blue upper regions of pure sky.

The eye is filled with beauty, and the heart

Rejoiced with sense of life and peace renewed;

And yet at such an hour as this, upstart

Vague myriad longing, restless, unsubdued,

And causeless tears from melancholy mood,

Strange discontent with earth's and nature's best,

Desires and yearnings that may find no rest.